Page 46 of A Song for Another Woman

“I’ll throw up.”

“Crackers?”

“I’ll throw those up too.”

She studies me for one long second. Then she reaches over and squeezes my hand once. Hard. “I’ll be fast.”

The automatic doors swallow her.

I sit alone beneath the parking lot lights and try not to breathe too deeply because the car still smells faintly like fryer oil from the diner and June’s vanilla hand lotion.

The radio is low. Then the opening notes of “Tennessee Whiskey” slip through the speakers.

My eyes close before I can stop them. No. Absolutely not.

Memory doesn’t care what I allow. It puts me back in a room before Wildfire, before Melody, before my face became something strangers replayed. Not the mansion. The little rental outside Nashville with the uneven floor and the window unit that rattled if it rained. Cade had come home from a writing session, exhausted and lit up, and this song had been playing from his phone on the dresser.

He had looked at me like coming home was still the best thing that happened to him. Slow. Aching. The kind of love that made the rest of the world feel far away and silly. His hands gentle at my waist. His mouth at my temple. My laugh catching when he pulled me closer and said, “Maybe this time, Emmy Lou.”

Maybe this time we made a baby.

He used to say versions of it with a grin against my skin, with hope under the joke. In hotel rooms, in the back of his truck, in the small blue bedroom of our first house after his second single climbed the charts.Maybe this time. Wouldn’t that be something? You think she’d have your eyes? You think he’d get my rhythm? Lord help the child if they get your stubborn.

ThenWildfiretook off. The jokes got quieter. Then they stopped.

Not all at once. Nothing ever disappears all at once. It thins. It loses volume. It becomes a thing you realize you haven’t heard in months while standing in a parking lot with your sister inside buying pregnancy tests.

The passenger door opens, and I flinch. June slides in and drops a paper bag into my lap. The weight of it is nothing. It feels like it could split the car in half.

“Got two,” she says. “And crackers. And a ginger ale.”

“I told you?—”

“I know. I panic-bought.”

The tests ride in my lap all the way home like a bomb waiting for the right room.

The song ends before we leave the parking lot. I keep my eyes closed anyway.

June waits in the hallway while I pee on both sticks because marriage may strip you down in public, but apparently pregnancy tests still deserve privacy.

The bathroom at June’s house is tiny, blue, and over-warm. There’s a chipped soap dish shaped like a shell by the sink, a towel with little embroidered lemons hanging crooked from the rack, and my own face in the mirror looking pale under the light.

I set both tests on the back of the toilet. Then I wash my hands for too long.

“You okay?” June asks through the door.

“No.”

The first test turns positive so fast it feels like a mistake. The second follows, and it feels like time just…stops.

For a moment, I can’t hear anything except the sink dripping. One drop. Then another. Then my own breath, broken and too loud.

I press both hands over my mouth.

A baby. Cade’s baby. Our baby.

The realization nearly sends me to the floor. A tiny life inside me. A future I once wanted so badly I made myself casual about it because wanting too openly felt like asking fate to humiliate me. A piece of the man I left. A piece of the girl I was when I believed love, if it was real enough, could not be misplaced.